Random Encounters: One
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I’ve decided to start a “series” of blog postings on the weekends which I’m calling Random Encounters. Really, all it is is an excuse for me to talk about stuff, like what’s going on with the blog and post some links from the previous week that I’ve found useful.
Is it weird that I like getting spam? It’s like a badge of honor. Shortly after opening this blog, Akismet caught one spam. Since then, there’s been absolutely no more… until yesterday. I’ve gotten 8 spam comments in the last day, and it’s really boosting my self-esteem. I’m important enough to be targetted by spammers! Yay! In other actual good news, I’ve had a flurry of legit comments from several different people in the past couple days as well. So I want to thank everyone who drops by, especially those who leave a comment! It’s really appreciated!
Speaking of comments, I’ve added several new plugins to the blog to make commenting here a bit more interesting and user-friendly.
Every comment is now accompanied by a picture; if you’ve got it set up, you can use your gravatar and if you don’t have a gravatar created it will generate a unique wavatar for you. The wavatars are based on your email address, and so as long as you use the same email address your wavatar will be consistent (even on other blogs using the wavatar plugin).
As seen on the Chatty DM’s blog, I’ve added a plugin which will allow you to edit your comments if you made a typo or something. I know I have a habit of typing too quickly and making stupid mistakes (like saying “to quickly” when I really don’t have a problem with confusing homonyms), so hopefully that’ll save you some embarassment. 
In a similar vein, I saw a cool thing on Aleph Gaming where for each comment if you provided a link to your own blog it would try to find the most recent post and provide a link to it. Called appropriately enough “CommentLuv” because it helps you spread the love!
While I’m on the topic of Aleph Gaming, Omnius pointed out that When the Sky Falls is available for free over on RPGNow. From the description it’s not something I would have thought twice about, but it’s a really, really cool product. If you like this blog, you’ll love When the Sky Falls, because it’s essentially a guide for implementing a world-changing “mega-encounter,” in this case a meteor strike. I haven’t had a chance to look at it much yet, but what I did see looked really cool, and it seems like the meat of the book is applicable to any system, though there’s a lot of d20-specific crunch in there too. Don’t know how long the offer’s going to last, though, so hurry up and get it!
Back to site news; I’ve been in a worldbuilding mood lately, so I suspect that you’ll be seeing more Campaign Fluff posts than Encounters. It’s been months since I’ve done any gaming at all, a couple disastrous experiments aside, and I’m getting antsy for the release of D&D 4th edition in June and the consequent start of my new campaign. In particular, I’ve already got two more Races with Flavor posts half-done.
Speaking of Races with Flavor, what do you guys think? Dig the thematic grouping of articles, or should I just stick to my normal way of doing things?
I’ve been checking out Jonathan Drain’s D20 Source lately. He’s got some really good posts in there, my favorite so far is The Invisible Dungeon which discusses dungeons as a metaphor for adventure design.
Also, thanks to that blog, I’ve discovered The Big List of RPG Plots, by S. John Ross. Absolutely amazing list, with lots of ideas for abstract plots that would be easy to apply anywhere. In fact, the whole point of the list is to try and boil down every adventure ever made into some variation of one of the plots on the list. Also has lots of examples of common twists for each plot, and some twists applicable to any plot, as well as suggestions on how to use the list for your own adventure design.
Anyways, that’s it for this week. Toodles!
I like all your posts, but specifically I wanted to encourage you to keep doing some Encounter posts. The internet is full of excellent blogs discussing gaming, GMing, game design, theory, etc. A lot of meta concepts. However, few have truly excellent crunch and examples.
You provide a blog full of inspiration. I read through the posts, write down little notes about half the encounters, and it gets my creative juices flowing. Some I plan to incorporate into my game directly, some modified, and some just inspire me. Awesome work!
Wow, thanks for the high praises!
I’ll do my best to do encounters… It’s really what I always meant for this blog to be about, and I feel a little guilty when I post the campaign fluff pieces (and hence why I felt the need to explain myself).
Rest assured though that encounters are still my primary goal. I have a lot of difficulty coming up with them, though, so really if it weren’t for the campaign fluff articles I’d be filling the blog with a bunch of lame things like “Kobolds in a mountain… on fire!”
Hey Asmor, you delightfully devious blogger, you do excellent work and fill a niche that very little others do.
However, don’t hesitate to deviate or explore things outside this format. The name Encounter a day does not tie you up with system neutral encounters. Today’s post is an excellent example of you branching out and still respect the blog’s fluff (i.e Brand).
Keep up the good work man!
Oh and good thinking on the plugins… I’m actually in the process of designing a new theme and I’ve got a ton of new plugins like Gravatars and Wavatars to implement.
The Chatty DM’s last blog post..Mini-Prep: Just how little do you need to prep?
Yep, feel free to explore whatever is exciting you at the moment, because the other way is burnout. I just wanted to encourage any crunch or fluff you had to post (specific encounters, interesting world building seeds, any details about anything, really, for any system).
I assume passive feed readers like Google Reader are becoming more popular, which would make a variable update schedule feasible. I keep rarely-updated sites like Ars Ludi and Jonathan Drain on my reader, and when they update I know. Otherwise, I don’t worry.
I read most of my favorite blogs on LiveJournal.
My primary goal in starting this blog is to increase my own creativity and discipline, though, so getting into a non-regular update schedule is not an option for me.
I’ve just started browsing through, but I really like all the ideas presented here. For some reason, I’m terrible at incorporating ideas I find in magazines, modules, and on-line into my game. Still, I like reading others’ ideas in the hope that some of it will percolate through.
Good luck getting more spam
Man, what would we do without Akismet?
Micah’s last blog post..Tragedy in Nent
Why wasn’t this blog already part of my RSS aggregate? Fixed!